Over the past two decades, digital video compression technologies have been developed and standardized to enable efficient digital video communication, distribution, and consumption. Most of the commercially widely deployed standards are developed by ISO/IEC and ITU-T, such as MPEG-2 and H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10). Due to the emergence and maturity of video compression technologies, high efficiency video coding (HEVC) may be developed.
With the growth of smart phones and tablets both in resolution and computation capability, additional video applications, such as video chat, mobile video recording and sharing, and video streaming, may require video transmission in heterogeneous environments. Scenarios such as 3-screen and N-screen that consider various consumer devices (e.g., PCs, smart phones, tablets, TVs, etc.) may accommodate video consumption on devices with widely varying capabilities in terms of computing power, memory/storage size, display resolution, display frame rate, etc. The network and transmission channels may have widely varying characteristics in terms of packet loss rate, available channel bandwidth, burst error rate, etc. Video data may be transmitted over a combination of wired networks and wireless networks, which may further complicate the underlying transmission channel characteristics.
Scalable video coding may provide a solution to improve the quality of experience for video applications running on devices with different capabilities over heterogeneous networks. Scalable video coding may encode a signal once at a highest representation (e.g., temporal resolution, spatial resolution, quality, etc.) and may enable decoding from subsets of the video streams depending on the specific rate and representation required by the applications running on client devices. Scalable video coding may save bandwidth and storage compared to non-scalable solutions. Video standards such as but not limited to MPEG-2 Video, H.263, MPEG4 Visual and H.264 may have tools and/or profiles that support some modes of scalability.